Big Deals: We Charted Billion-Dollar Tech Buyouts Since 2002

Lately, there have been so many billion-dollar tech acquisitions in the headlines that it's hard to keep them straight. We await Apple's buyout of Dr. Dre's Beats for $3.2 billion. YouTube is reportedly close to a purchase of the video game streaming service Twitch, for $1 billion. And it wasn't that long ago that Facebook made its big news with a $19 billion purchase of the messaging service WhatsApp.

How do all of these recent deals compare with the other big acquisitions of the past decade? We went back an arbitrary 12 years, which was firmly after the last tech bubble, and charted all the notable tech industry acquisitions of $1 billion or more. They're organized by size and company.

Looking at this, it reminded us what a huge force HP was in the early 2000s. What else do you notice from this chart?